Teaching a child BASIC will have social services after your kids ;-)
Is this "Get Atari computers muddled up day"? ;-)
Article: "1983 was the era of the early ZX Spectrum and Atari 260. These were real computers, where you had to write programs to get them to do anything"
The Atari 2600 (AKA VCS)? You must be thinking of something else (the Atari 400 or 800?). The 2600 console might technically have been a computer, but not in the sense that you mean- you *had* to use commercial software, since you couldn't program it in any meaningful sense. (#)
FWIW, this might have been true of the ZX81, but the Spectrum- being the first really cheap UK computer to be capable of a vaguely-passable approximation of arcade-quality- quickly accumulated a library of games, and I'm quite sure that even in 1983 many were being bought as gaming machines.
linicks: "I then somehow got an Atari 400ST"
From what you say about GFA BASIC, I'm guessing you mean the 520ST? the Atari 400 was a completely different (8-bit) machine and the smaller sibling to the Atari 800.
Also, I entirely agree with the sentiment of the story, so I don't want to give the impression that I'm at all critical of that in itself. However, at the risk of sounding like a d**k... not so much the idea of teaching a child BASIC specifically (or at least the unstructured BASICs on most 8-bit machines). I know it's a cliche to say that (at best) that these taught bad habits and (at worst) ruined many potential programmers... but speaking from personal experience, this- or at least the former- is absolutely true. :-(
Nowdays, there are many easy-to-use choices that don't have the damaging limitations of 8-bit BASICs, and I'd much rather go with them.
(#) Well, Atari *did* apparently release a "Basic Programming" cartridge, but from what I've heard it was unusably limited. Not surprising; they added a keypad controller, but didn't improve the VCS's 128 *byte* RAM (no, really). (##) Given that this was also a system with one line of screen memory (no, *really*) and no built-in text generation, it's astonishing that the designers managed to get it to work at all, let alone leave an astonishing sixty-something bytes for user programs after overheads.
(##) Remember that games came on *ROM* cartridges that could hold up to 4 KB, so under normal use the RAM would presumably only be used to hold things like scores, sprite positions, etc.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
